英美文学Lecture1,Shakespeare.ppt

William Shakespeare,the greatest poet in English,The Renaissance,The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. The Renaissance, which means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek cultures, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion.,Black Death,The Black Death in Florence, which hit Europe between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th-century Italy. Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife.,the Humanist Essence,The Renaissance in essence is a historical period in which the European Humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.,Above all, humanists asserted “the genius of man . the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind.“ Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Thomas More revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers, and applied them in critiques of contemporary government.,The humanists believed that it is important to transcend to the afterlife with a perfect mind and body. This transcending belief can be done with education. The purpose of humanism was to create a universal man whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning honorably in virtually any situation.,,The most influential writer in all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England.,As the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets , Shakespeare has left an immense legacy. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to profoundly affect the course of Western literature and culture ever after.,Hamlet Written during the first part of the seventeenth century (probably in 1600 or1601), Hamlet was probably first performed in July 1602. As was common practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works. He could have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark.,The raw material in Hamlet is the story of a Danish prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, and claims the throne. The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle off guard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge. Shakespeare changed the emphasis of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically minded prince who delays taking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain.,the Renaissance humanism,Shakespeare modified the revenge story and make it resonate with the most fundamental themes and problems of the Renaissance. The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon that began in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin texts that had been lost to the Middle Ages.,The scholars who enthusiastically rediscovered these classical texts were motivated by an idea that all of the capabilities and virtues peculiar to human beings should be studied and developed to their furthest extent. Renaissance humanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new interest in human experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of human understanding.,For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a better understanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the coordination of action and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a whole.,“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god— the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297),Skepticism about Humanism,As the Renaissance spread to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, a more skeptical strain of humanism developed, stressing the limitations of human under-standing. For instance, human beings could never hope to see past those appearances into the “realities” that l。